Explaining the British Empire

Summary

History 102: Explaining the British Empire

Hosts: Rudyard Lynch & Austin Padgett
Episode Release Date: April 7, 2025

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Introduction to the British Empire

The episode commences with Rudyard Lynch emphasizing the unparalleled scale and influence of the British Empire. He asserts, “The British Empire is the greatest empire in world history” (00:16). Lynch highlights the Empire’s global reach, spanning every continent and time zone, coining the famous phrase, “the sun never set on the British Empire.”

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Comparing Empires: British vs. Mongol

Austin Padgett acknowledges the British Empire’s supremacy but nods to the Mongols as the closest rival, albeit acknowledging the British’ more legitimate and sustained control. Rudyard concurs, stating, “there’s no metric where the British aren’t the biggest empire in the world” (01:57), and contrasts it with other empires like the Spanish and French, whose control was less effective geographically.

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The Formation of the British Empire

Lynch delineates the British Empire into two distinct phases:

1. First British Empire: Centered around America.
2. Second British Empire: Focused on India.

He attributes the establishment of these vast empires to the year 1763, referred to as the Anno Mirabilis, when Britain solidified its dominance in both North America and India following victories in pivotal battles like the Battle of Plassey (05:54).

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Internal Dynamics and the Diaspora

The hosts delve into the internal dynamics of the British Isles, particularly focusing on England, Scotland, and Ireland. Rudyard explains the Enclosures movement, which transformed common lands into private property, displacing vast populations and fuelling immigration to colonies like America (11:30). This section underscores the cultural and genetic implications of British colonization, noting that “out of any population in the world, the Irish have lots of grievances against the English” (05:31).

Austin adds personal anecdotes about Scottish and Irish ancestry, illustrating the deep-rooted conflicts and migrations that shaped the Empire’s workforce and colonial expansions (12:07).

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The Irish Experience Under British Rule

The episode provides a harrowing account of British conquest in Ireland:

• Initial Conquest: English invasion in the 1100s with brief control in the 1200s.
• Resistance and Repression: Intensive efforts by the English to subdue Ireland, including genocidal actions that significantly reduced the Irish population (25:03).
• Cultural Resistance: Irish music and rebellions are highlighted as forms of resistance against English oppression.

Lynch posits that the conquest and subsequent loss of Ireland mark the beginning and decline of the British Empire, emphasizing the brutal methods employed compared to other colonial powers (25:40).

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Colonization of North America

Rudyard outlines the British colonization of North America post the Seven Years’ War:

• Migration Patterns: Over a million British settlers moved to America, establishing various cultural hubs like New England (Puritans), the American South (Cavaliers), and Pennsylvania (Quakers) (32:08).
• Impact of the American Revolution: The loss of the American colonies was a pivotal moment, reshaping British policies and leading to the establishment of the Second British Empire centered on India (43:54).

Austin introduces the concept of Albion Seed Groups, genetic clusters that trace back to distinct British colonial migrations, affecting modern American demographics and cultural landscapes.

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The Second British Empire: India

India is presented as the crown jewel of the British Empire:

• East India Company: Established trading forts and gradually expanded control through strategic military and economic policies (53:56).
• Social and Economic Impact: Introduction of capitalism disrupted traditional Indian social structures, leading to massive famines and population shifts (90:05).
• Cultural Assimilation: British administrative practices and educational systems left a lasting legacy on modern India, including the widespread use of the English language (57:43).

Lynch argues that Britain’s control over India was both economically exploitative and culturally transformative, shaping India’s modern political and social fabric.

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Colonization in Southeast Asia and Africa

The discussion moves to British activities in Southeast Asia and Africa:

• Southeast Asia: Control over Malaysia, Burma, and parts of Indonesia was driven by strategic interests to support India and secure trade routes.
• Africa: The Scramble for Africa led to British dominance in regions like South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. Lynch notes the brutal suppression of revolts and the establishment of economic exploitations, such as plantations and railroads built using Indian and African labor (100:22).

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Decline of the British Empire

Several factors contributed to the Empire’s decline:

• World Wars: The two World Wars drained British resources and shifted global power dynamics.
• Internal Reforms: Post-American Revolution, Britain restructured its social and political institutions towards meritocracy and management, alienating traditional aristocratic elements (92:42).
• Independence Movements: Influential leaders like Gandhi employed both diplomatic and grassroots methods to negotiate independence, while economic dependencies on America further weakened Britain’s imperial grip (107:07).

Lynch emphasizes that Britain’s loss of India in 1947 marked a significant blow, leading to the rapid disintegration of the Empire.

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Cultural Impact and Modern Legacy

The British Empire’s legacy is multifaceted:

• Language and Education: English remains a global lingua franca, a direct outcome of British educational policies.
• Political Systems: Democratic institutions and legal frameworks in former colonies reflect British influence.
• Diaspora Effects: The genetic and cultural diversity in former colonies like America, Canada, Australia, and India continues to shape global societies today.

Austin highlights the nuanced cultural influences, such as the preservation of British aristocratic attitudes in India and the varied outcomes of different diasporic groups (58:12).

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Conclusion: The End and Lessons of the British Empire

Rudyard concludes by reflecting on the Empire’s end:

• Gentle Surrender: Unlike other empires, Britain largely relinquished its colonies without prolonged conflicts, driven by economic constraints and internal political shifts.
• Moral Justifications: While acknowledging the brutal aspects, Lynch argues that the British Empire also fostered legal and democratic institutions that benefitted former colonies.

He remarks, “the British Empire is profoundly anticlimactic” (104:42), noting its generous yet strategic disengagement from global colonies.

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Notable Quotes

• Rudyard Lynch (00:16): “The British Empire is the greatest empire in world history.”
• Rudyard Lynch (01:57): “There’s no metric where the British aren’t the biggest empire in the world.”
• Austin Padgett (25:03): “This is not like just an English rebellion or something or an American Revolution. This is just another Scots Irish rebellion.”
• Rudyard Lynch (43:54): “The first British Empire was based out of New York, which was their dominant command center for the continent.”
• Rudyard Lynch (92:42): “The British Empire reached higher highs while having equivalent brutalities to other European colonial empires.”

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Key Takeaways

• Scale and Influence: The British Empire's unprecedented global reach fundamentally shaped modern political, social, and economic structures worldwide.
• Dual Empires: The establishment of the First and Second British Empires centered on America and India, respectively, each with unique dynamics and impacts.
• Cultural Legacy: English language, democratic institutions, and legal frameworks are enduring legacies, alongside complex genetic and cultural diasporas.
• Decline Factors: Economic strain from World Wars, internal social reforms, and successful independence movements led to the Empire’s dissolution.
• Moral Ambiguity: While acknowledging the Empire's contributions to modern governance and economics, the episode critically examines the brutal and exploitative practices that accompanied British colonialism.

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This detailed exploration provides listeners with a comprehensive understanding of the British Empire's formation, expansion, cultural impacts, and eventual decline, enriched with personal anecdotes and critical analysis to offer nuanced insights into one of history's most influential empires.

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** Timestamps Reference**

• 00:16 - Introduction to the British Empire
• 01:57 - British vs. Mongol Empires
• 05:54 - Formation of the British Empire
• 11:30 - Internal Dynamics and Diaspora
• 25:03 - The Irish Experience Under British Rule
• 32:08 - Colonization of North America
• 43:54 - Transition to the Second British Empire
• 53:56 - The Second British Empire: India
• 57:43 - Cultural Assimilation in India
• 90:05 - Impact on India’s Social Structure
• 100:22 - Colonization in Africa and Southeast Asia
• 92:42 - Decline of the British Empire
• 104:42 - Conclusion on the Empire’s Decline

(Note: Timestamps are illustrative based on transcript sections and may not correspond to exact moments in the actual audio.)

Transcript

[Whatifalth]

Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist, Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Hi, everybody. So this episode of History 102 is on the British Empire. And say hi to Austin Padgett, our co host. So, hello. The British Empire is the greatest empire in world history. And just sheer geographic scale, and it spanned every major. It spanned every single continent, every single time zone. And it used to be said that the sun never set it on the British Empire, that there was never a single time when there wasn't a glint of sunlight on some part of the British Empire. And we are in the world the British Empire created. Whether the Industrial Revolution, the English were vastly disproportionate in the creation of modern science, capitalism, democracy. And the language we're speaking now is English. And there are two British empires. And the women who categorize this video is the first and the second British Empire. The first British Empire was America, and the second British Empire is India. And with these two British empires, which hinge upon the year 1763 or the Anno Mirabilis, you see the British establishing two of the great states of the modern world, not even thinking about it. And so let's get started in the British Empire.

[Austin Padgett]

All right. Yes, the biggest empire, although I guess that would be a record you could cheat your way to more easily than. Than the Mongols by just setting up a few islands. But they had it. They really had it legitimately covered. They had it down.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. I mean, there's no metric where the British aren't the biggest empire in the world. The Mongols are always the second. And then once you get past that, the range gets indeterminate where you could be like, oh, the Spanish, the Mongols, the French, and it's how you count. This is funny. Like, the French and the Spanish Empire have these huge tracks their people never colonized, but that they held on paper. But for the British, they genuinely had it. Because the British, they had Canada, they had India and its neighboring countries, Australia, an entire stretch of Africa from the Cape to Cairo. And that's not even touching half of their possessions. So the British were able to establish an empire in a world where France was a big country. And what I mean by that is that with the Industrial Revolution before it, France was considered an incredibly large nation, where France is the size of Texas and France has these 20 different subgroups and more than that, even big country. And so inside Europe People would point at France and say, france is one of our biggest countries. And so in a world based around pre industrial technology, Britain was seen as a relatively large country, although England is the size of Alabama or Pennsylvania and Britain at the size of Michigan. So it's not big by modern terms, but England was big enough that it could push its weight around and in the world of smaller states, and this is still incredibly true today, but things like culture, social institutions, technology mattered a lot. And so the English could figure out their own internal structure incredibly well. And they used the innovation they got from that to have an asymmetric power to attack everywhere around the world. And in the pre industrial world, most states were small. And you had a handful of great empires that are almost divinely ordained in that for whatever reason, either an incredibly capable leader or their population had enormous grit, were able to conquer large areas. And then after that they reformed. They fell apart. Once that initial zeitgeist or will to empire fell apart, that's the Romans, that's the Arabs, the Mongols, the Macedonians. And then what happened is that the world created by European colonialism, where France can claim half of the North American continent, developed a world in which you saw nations like Russia, India, America, Brazil operate on continental levels of scale and the Europeans couldn't compete with that. And ironically, the two powers that divided up Europe in the 20th century were two European diasporas or the Americans and the Russians.

[Austin Padgett]

And. Oh, because the. Oh, right. And you mean in World War II.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And this is a great point about the competition we mentioned earlier, where like you have the Celts basically going from all of Europe, pushed into like a teeny corner of the island and on the far side of it, and then they expand to have a bigger population than ever through this diaspora. And the diaspora is what took most of like that English population.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, growth. It's interesting that about a million people sailed from Britain to America in the colonial period and they have about 100 million descendants today, which is one of the most rapid population increase curves ever. Nice mug, by the way. You should show them their mug when our mug.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, yes, thank you. We've got these nice history 102 mugs.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Beautiful colors available.

[Rudyard Lynch]

We have merch. Merch. Sooner rather than later, you'll be able to click a link in the description and buy the merch. And you should buy the merch because it's good. And so I'm going to show merch at the end. Remind me to do that. But so we are going to directly or indirectly cover Every major British colony, because I am, I believe in the art, but I'm going to use four different colonies as symbolic for the British Empire, that being Ireland, America, India and Kenya. And I'm going to use these as test cases for symbols of different parts of the British Empire's development. And Norman Davies, who's one of the best historians of the current day and if any of you know him, please hit me up. Hit him up. I would like to speak to him where Norman Davies is a wonderful history of Europe and a history of Britain, both of which are over a thousand pages. But in his history of Britain he says that the British Empire was a global extension of the English's colonization of the British Isles and these two are interconnected. So when the British lost control of their empire in the British Isles and British is not an identity, we'll get to that. They also lost control of their global spanning empire because the same techniques that London used to control the British Isles were the techniques they ultimately developed to conquer the world. Similarly to how the battle startups the Spanish used to fight the Muslims were what they conquered the Aztecs and the Inca with. And the British Isles is an incredibly culturally diverse area. Not genetically, they're genetically pretty similar. But this map behind me has been passed down in my family since the 19th century and it's an ethnological map of the British Isles because this map's 1854 and in that time period there was a lot of self awareness about the different sub regions of the British Isles and whether their heritage was Irish or Welsh or Viking or Danish, Viking or Norwegian, Viking or Saxon or German. So this was a society that a lot of awareness about this. And I like to say that the story of the British Empire is written into my own blood because my father's side of the family is Irish and my mother's side is English or colonial era, 13 colonies, British. And so inside, inside my genetics are the conquerors and the concord of the British Empire. Out of any population in the world, the Irish have lots of grievances against the English and the colonial stock. Americans are one of the demographics that has done the best from the British Empire and it shows how history affects who we are as people without us even thinking about it. But what happens with the English control of the British Isles and watch the medieval Britain video is that the English were originally settlers from northern Germany and Denmark who took over the area of modern England from the Welsh. And so in the medieval period you had four major kingdoms. England, which was the Germanic one with a majority of the total British Isles population, then Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Over the medieval period, the English conquered the Welsh. And then what happened is that due to Elizabeth the first remaining a virgin with no descendants, there was no line for the English royal family in the late 1500s to follow. In the late 1500s or the reign of Queen Elizabeth, is a good starting point for the British Empire because with her death, ironically, the descendant of her hated rival, Mary Queen of Scots, James the First, the King of Scotland, became the King of England. And what this meant is that the Scottish ruling family moved down to London, became kings of a joint monarchy of England and Scotland. But in the process, they anglicized so that 50 years later, when they had to flee to Scotland due the English Civil War, the Scots treated them as foreigners and imprisoned them. So you saw this joint monarchy between England and Scotland that for complex reasons, due to a economic. An enormous economic depression caused by a failed Scottish colony in Panama, Scotland and England became a fused united kingdom where the English offered to bail out the Scottish nobility in exchange for Scotland's joining England. And this was based out of London. And it's interesting to look at the Scots as compared to the Irish, because the Scots are a people who fought the English for 800 years. And it's funny, they joined the English peacefully, But the binary is that Scotland converted to Protestantism and Ireland stayed Catholic. And it's fascinating to see because the English integrated peacefully with Scotland, and Scotland became a vastly disproportionate driver of the British Empire. If you looked at India or Africa or America, the amount of Scots was vastly disproportionate. Scotland was, interestingly, at a certain point, better educated and in some cases, wealthier than England and more technologically advanced. So the Scots were able to integrate into this English system as not an equal partner, but definitely a respected partner. But in the process, the Scottish nobility became Anglicized so much, they betrayed their own Scottish populations. And then so. And that's why so many Scots immigrated to America, because their own nobilities betrayed them and kicked off the land. And do you want to say anything before I compare that to Ireland?

[Austin Padgett]

Well, yeah, it is an interesting comparison. I won't get too much into it before you do, but just the aspect of them fighting, giving them a kind of a more equal partnership. And then today, Scotland kind of being a socialist dependent of England and Ireland being able to differentiate itself a little bit more on tax policy and stuff. So it's funny to see how winning is losing, losing is winning, and it goes back and Forth. But yeah, that's when my family came to the US is when the English burned down a lot of those farms in Scotland. Like the great burnings. Yeah, 1600s and 1700s.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And yeah, I have Scottish ancestry and I had an ancestor and he was a bastard son of Scottish royalty who was his ancestors were. And he had this tiny castle in the west of Scotland and he rebelled against the English in 1703 and then was shipped over to South Carolina where he became a fur trader and translator and married a Cherokee woman and threw him indirectly, according to at least my not very good genealogical research through him, indirectly, I might be related to Robert the Bruce, Harold Godwinson, William the Conqueror and William Marshal, because the English or the British nobility and royalty were all so completely interbred that if you're related to one of them, you're related to all of them. And so it's interesting you bring that up. Also, Celts at this point are mostly a North American species. There are some Celts down in Australia and New Zealand, but they're demographically insignificant. I like calling them demographically insignificant because the Aussies in the audience get so pissed at it and.

[Austin Padgett]

Well then the amazing thing is the, the Appalachian Mountains are the same mountain range as the mountains in Scotland.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. It's why in both England and America's Rust Belt you see coal deposits. Because in the Carboniferous period it was this jungle. And the Carboniferous, the Carboniferous was about 250 million years ago. And in that time period there was four times as much oxygen on earth and the entire Earth was tropical. So you saw these 11 foot millipedes and these dragonflies with 5 foot wingspans because the size of insects is in direct proportion to the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere. And then what happened was due to enormous forest fires, these tropical jungles were condensed into a sort of peat moss that over millions of years or hundreds of millions of years became coal. So that's why coal deposits exist in both Britain and North America, because they were connected by Pangea. And then in the process, it's also why we can burn coal for industrial purposes. Because coal is, it's packed jungle material, it's packed animal jungle material, which is why it has power where it's still solar energy.

[Austin Padgett]

Indirectly you can burn Pete, so of course you can burn Super Pete, which is what coal is.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I've been told that my ancestors burnt Pete. That was one of the things my mom thought about where my mom experimented with burning Pete when she was bored. She would just get it and see how you got to burn it. That's a different story.

[Whatifalth]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

So there was Scotland and Ireland, so there's like 70 million English or 60, less than 60 million English today. And then the English diaspora is over. Outside England is over 100 million. Then you'd have Ireland and Scotland both have populations of like, Ireland's a 6 million, I think, or 8 million, and Scotland's like 5 million. Then their diasporas are each like 70 million, which is absurd. So in, in Scotland, in all of the British Isles, what happened was you had a period called the Enclosures, where you had this traditional village life, where you had the village and then you had these huge common lands for grazing and getting wood. And then the English gentry class said, psych, this is our land now. This is private property. We're going to have the Industrial Revolution and have commercial agriculture, which in the long term was a very good decision that resulted in the rise of, of the Industrial Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution. But it displaced this huge British population, which mostly went to North America. And this was most pronounced in the Celtic countries, especially Scotland, where the Scottish nobility went, psych. We used to be part of clans where, where we would fight together and we lived in these villages together as part of this extended family. We're English now. You're going to America now. We're kicking you off our land and replacing you with sheep. So the Scots have a degree of betrayal and resentment from that. And all of the British Isles went through this process of exporting a huge amount of their most intrepid people. So when you're looking at the British Isles now, you're looking at the people who didn't leave and the people who didn't die in the World wars. But so Ireland, the first British colony we're going to look at, and Ireland is probably the most difficult place the English had to conquer, which feels strange because you see the global spanning British Empire and you don't think the tiny islands next to them would be so much trouble. But the English first invaded Ireland in the 1100s, and then they briefly conquered half of Ireland in the 1200s. What then happened is that those first English settlers assimilated into Irish culture so much that the joke went that they were more Irish than the original Irish. And then what happened over the course of the medieval period is the Irish pushed them back. So the English had this small area around Dublin called the Pale. If you know the phrase beyond the pale, that's where it's, it's from. And what happened in Queen Elizabeth's reign is that the English, with new use of drill and gunpowder, they were finally able to wipe out the Irish. And the Irish fought incredibly hard. Where you'll look at the primary sources at Jamestown with the Irish, the English who settled in America. And what they'd frequently say is because it was the same, exact same people who colonized Ireland as America as the natives are really hard to fight, but at least they're not the Irish. Because the Irish would fight with fanatical courage. You'd have to literally kill them off to get them to stop fighting. And at least twice, the English literally lowered Ireland's population by two thirds to get the Irish to submit. So firstly, in the 1500s, they finally got Ireland to agree to be part of England, but Ireland was still under native confederacies. And then in the English Civil War, or a little bit before it, under Chief Tyrone, which is an Irish name that now has different connotations. Chief Tyrone launched a successful revolt in which he was able to wipe out every major English army. And Tyrone, or the earlier Irish, launched genocide against the Scots Irish settlers in the north of Ireland, where the Scots Irish had a vastly disproportionate impact on America. And they were the Scots brought over to settle the north of Ireland because the initial English plan was to genocide all of Ireland's population and replace it with Protestant settlers. And so the Irish. Actually, the first act of the English Civil War was the native Irish genociding the Scots Irish. And the English didn't know what to do with this because one faction of the English Civil War was sympathetic to the Irish and the other to the Scots. So it created this gridlock. And then Cromwell, at the end of the English Civil War, reinvaded Ireland. He killed off the entire Irish nobility, killed one third of the population, evicted one third of the population as slaves. Or there was a brief Irish, brief Irish slavery in the Caribbean where they almost all died. One of my favorite songs ever by Irish metal band Tobacco island is about that exact event. Irish slaves sent to Barbados in 1659. And then the English kept Ireland under their heel, where the local Irish were not allowed to vote, own property, obtain an education and kept as serfs. So the Irish were stuck in this degrading poverty. Well, there was an English ruling class that didn't even live in Ireland. They had these huge plantations in Ireland. Well, they themselves live in England. And the Duke of Wellington, when asked who was ethnically English, when asked, when you're. You're Irish, aren't you? He said, because a man is not born a stable does not make him an animal. So you're looking at one of the most brutal examples of the British Empire here, where you could make the argument the Irish were treated worse than the Indians or the Africans. And that's not socially acceptable to today because it goes. It goes in direct opposition to our racial understandings of the world. But European colonialism wasn't actually about race, for in almost any case, it was about the wielding of power and the ability to take over as much as possible. The Germans were more mean to the Polish than they were to the Africans. The Russians were more mean to a lot of white ethnic minorities inside their lands than Asian ones. And Ireland saw this incredibly rapid population growth under English control, where it went from half a million people in the year 1600 to 8 million in 1840, which is one of the most ludicrous population growths ever in history. And by the time you get to 1840, the Irish were stuck in completely degrading poverty. They'd live off a single acre of potatoes. And then you saw the potato famine in the 1840s, where, again, one third of Ireland's population died, another third immigrated to America, and the final third remained. And the Irish kept on having all of these revolts. And one of the things I've realized as a Celt is that other groups of white are significantly less barbaric than we are, where, like, a majority of Celtic music is up murdering people. It's a rebelling. There's an entire genre called murder ballads, which is you saying why you murdered someone and why it was justified in the context. And so the Irish kept rebelling against the English, and the English kept on trying to keep their heel over Ireland's throat. And in 1797, there was a rebellion which Irish music will never forget about. And then there was another revolt in 1916 where the British bloodily put down the Easter Rising. And then there was a horrifying civil war. And in 1923, the English gave up Ireland because they lost the will to hold it. And it's interesting where you could mark the conquest of Ireland and the loss of Ireland as the start and the fall of the British Empire, because they conquered Ireland in the late 1500s, and then they gave it up in 1923. So as long as the English had the will to hold their white Catholic neighbors, they had the will to hold brown people and black people.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And they were fighting the entire time. So it's not. And it's not, you know, combining Ireland and Scots Irish. And they all had kind of similar gripes with the English. But there's a quote in the book Born Fighting by a Hessian Soldier. A great book. Yeah. And he's saying that this is not like, just like an English rebellion or something or an American Revolution. This is just another Scots Irish rebellion. Because 44% of the fighting force in the revolution was Scots Irish and they did like 80% of the actual hard fighting.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So.

[Austin Padgett]

And so if they move across, if they've been fighting for hundreds of years, thousands of years, and then they move all the way across the ocean, you think they're just going to stop fighting there? So that, that Scotch Irish continuation of the Scotch Irish rebellion enabled the northeastern political intellectual revolution to take place. And the English owned, I think, 97% of the farmland in Ireland. So it's just, it's funny, like they're like, okay, yeah, we'll switch, we'll switch to capitalism. Except I'm the lord of this village, so all this property is mine. It's not like everybody gets their parcel. And the England English took control of all those noble land holdings. And that was literally all the arable land.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I'm going to fact check you briefly there, where that was true of the southern frontier, where there were three different core populations that fought for the American Revolution. Yankee Puritans, Virginian Cavaliers, and then Scots Irish. So those are the three populations that supplied most of the American Revolution. And in the north, the army was almost entirely Puritan Yankees. And in the south, south of Virginia, it was almost all Scots Irish. So the American Revolution, this is a great transition. There were multiple ethnically motivated armies that were raised among certain populations in America. And the irony is the British Americans were the ones who are most for the revolution. And the people against the revolution were white ethnic minorities like the Scots, the Dutch or the French who, or the Germans who felt queasy about giving the colonies self governance. Because the colonies, there's a greater degree of objectivity to a faraway ruler than a closer one. And this is why people frequently backstab their locals to let enemy conqueror in, because in a lot of cases the enemy conqueror will treat you better than the local conqueror because the enemy conqueror just doesn't care because he has other stuff to do. But that's a beautiful transition to the, the first British Empire, which is America, where in Queen Elizabeth's reign there was this general desire to imitate the Spanish. And the foundation of the British Empire was done almost entirely due to envy of how big the Spanish Empire was. Because the Spanish had an empire that covered every single continent in the world. Even they had ships in Antarctica and they had, they had a colony in the Solomon Islands and they sailed past Australia. And the British especially envied the gold and the silver and the slaves that the Spanish had in Mexico and Peru. And it started out with piracy where the English in the early modern period were just colloquially called a nation of pirates and shopkeepers because the continent saw the English as incredibly mercantile. And the English had a medieval trade system that stretched from North Africa to Russia and through the Baltic. And interestingly, Queen Elizabeth's mariners rediscovered Russia which had been forgotten for centuries due to the Mongol conquest. But Queen Elizabeth had these pirates who would sail around and they were. The piracy was seen as a defensive force against the Spanish where they were state sanctioned privateers and they raided the Caribbean, they would attack Spain. And Sir Francis Drake sailed around the entire world in the late 16th century, which is very impressive. And the Spanish built up the social technology for an empire due to fighting the Muslims. And it took the Dutch, the French and the English an additional century where I think they had to use the. The military and social technologies mobilized for the wars of religion in their colonial empires. So the first place the English really took interest in settling was North America. And I am going to be somewhat spare because we have an entirely different episode on colonial America that goes into greater depth. If I feel like. And I read a few other books, we'll also give a video at the Raj. But so the first British colonies were late 16th century in Newfoundland. And when they saw North America, the English said this is a climate that looks a lot like England and it's completely empty. And so saying completely empty today will trigger a lot of people because you'll people will be like the natives were there first, but the natives. The natives at a 90% fatality rate from disease. So it was genuinely pretty empty at that point. And they started settling white British people in eastern North America. And as I said before, about a million people moved over from Britain to the eastern seaboard of North America. And you can see the first British Empire which was really North America. And the Caribbean is. It's an extension of British social structures where the things going on in Britain in that time period have been fossilized in America's social structure. And there's a great book we mentioned last video called Fairness and Freedom by David Hackett Fisher. How America has all of these elements from 17th century Britain and New Zealand from 19th century Britain. And that includes the ideas of freedom, the ideas of religious tolerance. Science was developed in the 17th century. Gun ownership was incredibly prevalent in Britain. Capitalism was growing popular. And so when I talk about this in the colonial America Video you saw these different subgroups of British leaving the British ecosystem to North America. Between the Puritans, when they were a losing faction in the English Civil War, settled in New England. The Cavaliers from the British Southwest who populated the American coastal South. The Quakers from the English Rust, what became the English Rust Belt, who moved to Pennsylvania and established the culture of the American Rust Belt. The Scots Irish Appalachians who. Who started out in Norther in the borderlands in England and Scotland, who then migrated to Northern Ireland and still in poverty there, they migrated to Appalachia. I know you love the Albion seed stuff, so say more.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, I was just thinking of a. Unrelated reference from that in terms of how cold it was when people showed up. Yeah. When they came into Massachusetts, not far north of that, there were giant glaciers that looked like the Dover Hills.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Interesting.

[Austin Padgett]

You know, the Canadian Arctic encroaching down. And then there was also a ridiculous amount of cod and fish and. Yeah, things like. It was a really shocking. It was a really. A land of obvious bounty to them. Not to mention the trees. But yeah, that study of intra British rivalries is so important because they drive so many of our arguments and preferences and we're not actually. We don't actually understand how we're connected to those different cultures. It's like everything you say is an idea that comes from someone's head. Like people repeat Keynesian myths without even knowing who Keynes is. It's the same thing with culture. And identifying that is really useful. It's also a really useful way of understanding the real political tensions. And that's kind of been whitewashed, pun, no pun intended, but it works by the, the, the left, like man is a real state. Well, yeah, that too. But the identity framing of white, black, brown, brown or whatever, because like you said, most of the brutal fighting was like they treated the Irish worse than any anybody else. It. The real battles are over like culture, power, money, values, at least on. In terms of the history of how it developed. And so I think like the most advanced level of racism is intra. Intra white bigotry, if you can get there.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. The. I can't overstate the importance of the Albion seed stuff. Albion Seed is a book by David Hackett Fisher about these British migrations. And if you're a foreigner, you probably don't understand how diverse white Americans are where interestingly white Americans or Americans in general. 60% of Americans belong to a colonial erogenetic group that stems from one of these migrations. And you can genetically find what group of what. Which of these groups in American is from their blood. And these are genetic groups that in a lot of cases are larger than European countries where the, the Scots Irish diaspora. There are more Scots Irish in America than black people. And so that's like 50 million people and that's the same population as France or England. So these are really huge groups. And it's easy to forget that on our very currency is e pluribus unum, or out of many one. And, and that was because at the time of the revolution on until the time of the Civil War, they called us these United States or a plural because America was seen as multiple countries that existed together and that's been incredibly whitewashed. And I find our current leftist understanding of race, everything is black and white. It's so stupid and it's so simplified because it only really makes sense in the pre established Marxist mid 20th century narrative in America. Black and white both symbolically and literally. Racial relations make no sense in Europe, they make no sense in Asia, they make no sense in Africa. It's just this very specific time of leftist propagandists in modern America where we can obsess over colonialism in black people this much and it whitewashes the entire human condition.

[Austin Padgett]

It's the same thing from black people because you have populations from Angola and other, other parts. And I'm sure there's cultural impacts of that that I don't even know much about. Yeah, even though there was a little bit more cultural loss in translation, there's going to be a lot of cultural ties that go through that connection. And you're right, the real point of it all is decentralization. It's to realize that the federal government is like an EU project and these are, and there are entire different European cultures within the US that, that have different cultural values that go back hundreds and then thousands of years. Like the differences between the Saxons and the Celts. Those are, those draw from thousands of years of history. And if you try to put all those under a single, all those separate values, under a single orthodoxy to the more the government makes decisions, the more that orthodoxy is going to have to violate one of the all of those other values in order to enforce a single orthodoxy. So we're discovering all these tensions as the Internet lets us rediscover our real values. And we're moving beyond Walter Cronke and we don't even know why we disagree. It's like there are different cultures in the US among the white population as.

[Rudyard Lynch]

An example of this, and I'm a zoomer, so I'm Very young, when I went to public school in Pennsylvania, which is one of the states with the most state pride, we had a just Pennsylvania state textbook, where part of the curriculum was just studying Pennsylvania and its history and its independent culture. And as an example of this, in Pennsylvania in the colonial period, there were legitimate wars between Puritan settlers up by Scranton with the plurality Quaker population. And they also had skirmishes with the Scots Irish further west, like the Wyoming Valley massacre. So you see these different groups of British Americans, these were people who saw themselves as distinct, practically ethnic groups who literally fought wars with each other from time to time, although it wasn't that common. So there are. And we studied Ben Franklin obsessively because he's a local hero to Pennsylvania. He's like our patron saint.

[Austin Padgett]

They would have fought wars if they had the same level of central control as we do today. If you put that on them, they would have fought immediately. That had to be eased in.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, yes. I don't want to get too boiled down in the LBNC discourse because it's not the main point of the British Empire, but it's very interesting. And in America, you see a trajectory of British culture that Britain has lost, where the culture of old Britain only really exists in America between laissez faire capitalism, Parliament having a genuine democratic tradition. Britain's not really a democracy anymore. Separation of powers, science. There's more vastly, a majority of all British blood in the world resides in America, as an example. And so with the British Empire, you see these different trajectories that existed in Britain manifest in the British diaspora in radically different ways. What we talked about in America with the Albion seed groups is an easy example, but we're going to keep seeing it as a pattern. And next, the other area of the first British Empire was the West Indies or the Caribbean. And this was something where they put a lot of effort into colonizing it in earlier on, where in the 1600s, as many Europeans, as many British migrated to the West Indies as North America. It's just the west indies experienced a 60% mortality rate of white immigrants. So those people died. And interestingly, to talk about Barbados, which is a tiny island off the coast of South America, it used to have an enormous white tobacco farming population. What happened with the introduction of sugar agriculture was that they imported these black slaves over from Africa because sugar agriculture is so brutal that white people physically cannot sustain the disease and heat because we're genetically not built for the tropics. So you saw this Max. Mass exodus of white settlers from Barbados to South Carolina. And they established the culture of the American Deep south, which is a. The Deep south is the only part of eastern North American cultures that does not stem from Europe because it was white people moving to Barbados, learning about tropical, tropical plantation agriculture from a combination of Sephardic Jews and French Huguenots, then bringing it to the American south where you see the culture of rice and indigo and cotton and sugar. I promise to talk about America less going forward. We're not just the whole British Empire. I apologize European fans, but we are the most important former British colony and.

[Austin Padgett]

One of the only one besides Rhodesia, that became its own thing. So it's a significant part of it to examine.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. So then Cromwell sent this huge armada to conquer the Caribbean and the British sent multiple armadas of 40 to 50,000 men to conquer the Caribbean because they saw the stultification and decline of the Spanish Empire where over the course of the 17th century, Spain went from this stunning global power that terrified Europe and everyone thought they were to conquer all of Europe to this completely weak, dystopian, collapsing, sick society by the year 1700. And so the English kept on thinking New Spain or the Spanish colonies are so poorly managed we could take over the entire Caribbean if we wanted. And what happened each time was disease wiped out a majority of the guys and so they couldn't take out the Caribbean even though the Spanish didn't fight very hard. And so you saw the places the British did conquer between the Bahamas, Jamaica, which was a Cromwell conquest. Barbados, a bunch of islands in the Lesser Antilles I never think about. And Belize, Belize is the only English speaking country in Latin America. It's next to Guatemala. And the British brought in, the British brought in black slaves to populate the Caribbean where most of Those places are 99% black, because they were using it for sugar agriculture. And watch the Atlantic slave trade video. But as an example, the island of Barbados was worth. And Barbados is probably, I don't know, it's probably like the size of a county back in Pennsylvania. It's definitely the size of a county in Texas. Barbados was worth more than the entire French Canada combined out through the Great Lakes and the Great Plains because Canada used to go into the American Midwest and the Great Lakes. So Barbados was worth more than half of the North American continent. So when you're looking at these small hellish slave sugar economies, this was the 18th century's equivalent to oil.

[Austin Padgett]

Okay, so they, that's probably also why the, the resources for keeping America versus the profitability per resource just couldn't compete with spice sugar islands.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And interestingly, the British Parliament became controlled by the Caribbean sugar interests, because people go to the Caribbean, they'd get these sugar plantations, they'd become stunningly wealthy, move back to Britain, buy a parliamentary seat. And an interesting thing is that part of the lead up to the American Revolution was these sugar interests being super imperialistic because they felt like they owned America, because they went there, conquered it, went back, and Britain abolished slavery. Once the Industrial Revolution established this industrial leadership class that could finally outvote the sugar lords. I'm going to run in the bathroom. I'll be back.

[Austin Padgett]

Excellent.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So excellent. We have reached the most important year of the British Empire, or 1763, which was called the Anno Mirabilis, or the Year of miracles, because the year 161763 was part of the Seven Years War, which has been called the First World War because it started due to a combination of Frederick the Great trying to conquer a part of Poland from the Austrians and then the French and British fighting over Pittsburgh. But then it spiraled into this global spanning conflict in which the the British fought the French in North America, the Portuguese fought the Spanish in South America, the Prussians fought the Russians, Austrians and French in Europe, and the Prussians somehow won due to Frederick the Great being a chad. And then the British and the French fought over India. So in 1763, the British won a stunning and brave victory over the French in India, which meant that they conquered India in the long term. And then the British also beat the French at Quebec, conquering Canada, which ultimately resulted in the American Revolution. So losing the first British Empire and gaining the second British Empire, where Pitt the Elder, who was the British Prime Minister and possibly the best British Prime Minister ever, he picked a strategy of emphasizing fighting the French in the colonies rather than in Europe, which was seen as revolutionary in the time, but it built the British Empire, where in North America, the British conquered French Canada and through a pretty impressive battle at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, where the British weren't going to win it, and they scaled a mountain with artillery to attack the French in the flank. And I've been to that battle multiple times because I love Quebec City, one of my favorite parts of North America. And with it, the British took all of French Canada and they quickly turned it into one of the most loyal parts of the British Empire by pandering to both the landowner nobility class in the church by instituting them in power more. And what happened is that the British cleaned up all of the French possessions east of the Mississippi. So The British Empire had everything. They even took Florida, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson's Bay, where the English actually had fur trading forts in Hudson's bay in the 1600s that reached as far as America. And then the Spanish took everything west of the Mississippi. And what this did in North America was that first of all, the American Revolution, the French and Indian War, as we call it here, destroyed the external French threat, which kept the Americans moored to the British. It secondarily had the Americans fight enough that they had. They were able to build up their own military and leadership system. And the British also tried to tax the Americans for it, which made the Americans resentful. So the aftermath of the French and Indian War was to give the British Canada. And then the Americans started on this trajectory towards independence, where they split off from the British Empire.

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting. And that makes me think of Australia, because I was wondering, why did they not separate from the British Empire? And maybe it had something to do with that French threat in America, not France, but just the fact that. Because I was thinking Australia is even farther away. How is England going to control them? Maybe they were so far away they felt a little bit insecure because they were looking at the population around them or access to certain resources. They wanted to keep a good relationship.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The British really failed at the American Revolution. The American Revolution was not a war that needed to happen. And the British got stuck in this grandstanding between the Tories and the Whig Party or the Liberal and the Conservative Conservatives, where, interestingly, the British Whig Party openly supported the Americans. And the American Revolution was incredibly unpopular war because for lots of English especially, they thought the Americans were in the right. The inventor of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, wrote articles at how he supported the American Revolution. And then the Tory Party, due to this internal British squabble, they became incredibly anti American independence. So the British kept on not making concessions when they could have, when the Americans wanted to make concessions, which trapped the Americans in an unpleasant place. So the Americans launched the War of Independence and the British learned their lesson from the American Revolution, where the Brits don't like talking about it, but the American Revolution was actually a seminal moment in British history because losing it destroyed the power of the British monarchy. George the Third was the last British king to really hold power in a political sense, and he screwed up in America. So the PMs took power after that. And then secondarily, the British had. The British sided to reformulate their social structure towards merit and against aristocracy. Due to the failure of the American Revolution. So what happened in the future with all of the other white colonies like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa is they gave them functional independence pretty early to avoid the American Revolution.

[Austin Padgett]

Again, that's a really important point because you're right, people underestimate how much some people in England would have been invested in the success of the revolution. Because in England it was a time of extreme ideological revolution and turmoil. And there were all these new ideas about freedom and individual sovereignty and God and. And king of your own castle and all that stuff. And the way that they prevented those from gaining traction in England was they said they could do kind of like a. Compared to what? If we get rid of the. If we get rid of Chesterton's fence and go with these completely theoretical political ideas never tried in human history, no idea if they'd work. They could always point to a counterfactual. And then King George knew in his letters, like you said, he said, if America succeeds, it's going to be really successful and we're going to be screwed. So the fact that King George knows these theoretical ideas are going to work and that's why he's trying so hard. So even though the nobility pretended that these were just theories, they, the smart ones knew it was going to work. They were just trying to hold on to their power and there's nothing more powerful than a counterexample. So it's like, why do you get excited about something in Argentina that could. With Malay, you know, give me an example of our ideas. Like Sweden didn't do certain COVID policies so you could point to them as an example. So everyone's always interested in what's happening in other countries so they can get around, actually have their counterfactual the.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So the first British Empire was based out of New York, which was their dominant command center for the continent. And the second British empire was based out of Calcutta. And in the anno mirabilis, the same year as the takeover of Quebec, the British won the Battle of Plassey in India, which secured control of Bengal, the wealthiest and most populous region of India. Where the way the British took over India is that under Queen Elizabeth again they established the East India Company that put forts in South India. And they started out just as these trading places to get spices and easter and luxuries in those things. And the British had no intention of forming the empire in almost every case. Most long lasting successful empires were never intended to happen. They just gradually occur because the empire is more competent than people they deal with. So America was the gradual exodus of these British people. And in India, what happened is that the centralized Mughal empire that controlled almost all of India under a Persian cultural Islamic dominance fell apart in the early 18th century. And this provoked this sociological and political anarchy over India. There's a book by William Dalrymple called the Anarchy about this time period. And everyone was saying this was an incredible book a few years ago. And I read it, it was actually pretty boring. But with the fall of the Mughal Empire, you saw anarchy where the Afghans fought across all of North India, reaching the edges of Calcutta, which is by Bangladesh, the Maratha Empire. Who were these hill tribes in South India? They conquered north and took over Delhi, becoming the new major empire. So what occurred was that the British kept on getting attacked by local Indian populations who kept on trying to want to steal their stuff in the forts. And there was this terrible situation where the Nawab of Bengal and Bengal had lots of political disturbances with one dictator seizing power than another. He attacked Calcutta and then shoved the entire British population into a poorly ventilated basement where a lot of them died from horrifying diseases and living in their own shit and stuff. And this provoked a huge cry in Britain to take down the Nawab. And so the British had two colonies, one in Madras in South India and the other in Calcutta. And what the British found through training local armies were almost. Almost no British people were actually involved in the colonization of India. There was one Britain for every thousand Indians. They trained local forces with white officers. The British could routinely beat Indian armies outnumbered 10 to 1. And the battle of Plassey as an example under Clive is the British were literally outnumbered the battle of plassey 10 to 1. The British dueled with the Indian artillery, and the Indians got artillery from the French. The British beat the Indian artillery. And then the Indian army just gave up. They just refused to fight. Like, we're leaving now.

[Austin Padgett]

So this sucks.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The British won this seminal battle that gave them India because the Nawab of Bengal was being pushed by the French because the Indian army just gave up. They just chose not to fight.

[Austin Padgett]

It sounds pretty smart. It sounds like they were about to do a French World War I cavalry charge and then decided, like, actually, no.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I mean, if you. If you have a 10 to 1 numeric superiority, you can win if you choose to win.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And go for it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And so the British also wiped out the French's colonies in South India in the Seven Years War. And there was an alternate timeline where the French could have conquered India, which would have made France the preeminent global power, because India had 80% of the population of the British Empire. Because, and this is why I focus upon the four different countries where Ireland is a local white barbarian country. The English conquered. North America was a continent stripped of population that the English settled. India is a thousands of year old completely distinct urbanized civilization that had fallen to decadence. The British conquered and Kenya was a region that was very lightly populated due to disease. Reasons that the English established the first urban, urban literate society in or at least a lot of Kenya. So it's very different context. You see the British operate in. And the British conquest of India was done for almost entropic reasons that the British would keep getting sucked into local disputes. They would beat the locals and install themselves in power. And for most of this time period, more Indians were under the rule of local rajas under British governance than the actual East India Company. And the East India Company was actually seen as significantly more humane and better at governance than the local rajas. Which is why over time more and more of India became run by the East India Company. And the East India Company was the biggest corporation in the world or probably history where they came to control almost all of India. And they were a company like Apple or Microsoft who had shareholders and they were operating out of profit. And so their thing is they wanted to turn the nation of India into a for profit enterprise. And there were both, but good and bad aspects to it where as an example, they installed capitalism into India, removing the old collective rule on land. And this created enormous social disturbance. And there is this multiple times the British once they installed capitalism because this was a low trust society. You saw the local Zamindars or landowners just use it to horrifically exploit the population. Because the British with installing capitalism, their assumption was that this was a high trust Christian society where you would get the benefits of social cooperation because they forgot things like rule of law or a church structure or certain not having the caste system. And so the British control of India saw this enormous destructive cultural shift of India that actually affected lots of normal Indians through influencing the social structure. And there were very clear negatives. As an example, some of the worst atrocities in history were the famines that occurred in British India which killed like 25 million people. But at the same time, modern India is a British creation, it's not an Indian creation. And that's completely taboo to say. But the British made modern India's borders, they established its bureaucratic system, its military system, they established how it's run. Almost every single aspect of modern India was created by the British.

[Austin Padgett]

It's pretty crazy because English is the second language in India and second language is a big deal in India. English, because English is bigger than almost every other language spoken in India at the time. And there's a lot of them spoken by over 10 million people. And it's, it's like, like Hindi. It's often as uniting of a language within the country as, as Hindi as itself.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. I know you've been to nearly every province in India, so you must have a story or two about the British.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, well, I met a Indian guy there who was a big fan of Atlas Shrugged and he went to a, he took me to a British style club, like gentleman's club that was all just like old English stuff. It was started by a Scottish guy and there's a lot of, there's a lot of cool taipan type Scottish English aristocrat culture that you'll find throughout like Hong Kong and India and, and Asia. And they, they look at their ideas and their, their buildings as kind of herald of enlightenment.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

So there's like an appreciation in parts of India for like somewhat lost, an attitude that's somewhat more lost in our culture. But you know how like certain cultural aspects can be preserved outside of that country where, where they're not as affected by the change in that country since then. There's kind of like a preserved colonial attitude.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's interesting because I've talked before the different aspects of the British diaspora where a certain part went to America and then another form of British culture went to India. And it was this regal 19th century Victorian culture. And one of the interesting things here is through conquering India and for the second British Empire, it's more useful to see this British Empire based around India than around Britain because the British colonized so many places to secure India. And the East India Company literally had their own foreign policy with their own private army based around India where Oman, Egypt, Kenya and South Africa or the African Empire. The British conquered it to hold on to India because Egypt is the Suez Canal which connects the Mediterranean. The Cape is the bottom of Africa and Kenya is the shore of Africa that faces India. The British conquered Malaysia to secure the routes for India. The British conquered Australia because they already had the East India Company's ships in India. And the British fought the Opium War against China because the East India Company had its own foreign policy where they were trading to China and they need to balance the trade budget. The British also had their own foreign policy called the Great Game, which was over the course of the 19th century, the British were terrified the Russians would muster an Afghan army from Central Asia and launch an invasion of India. So the British had their secret agents who were operating in Uzbekistan or western China or Afghanistan to act as psyops against the Russian influence there. And the British literally worked with Persia and they moved armies into Persia and built railroads to prop up Persia as an ally against Russia. But I'm going to say this so I don't forget it. In the process of conquering India, Britain also orientalized itself in a lot of ways.

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting, because normally you think of that reverse immigration, reverse colonization associated with the massive immigration going on right now.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Is there an ideological reverse colonization, cultural.

[Rudyard Lynch]

This is one of the things Amore Durian Corps, who's my favorite author, who was an orientalist with a speciality in India, he talks about really? Well, first of all, Queen Victoria was made Empress of India, and she was one of the few European emperors. And you can see that's just an easy symbolic example. But another, more important one is the social service and socialist bureaucracy the British use on themselves now was developed for India, where the British developed what they call the paper Raj, where they developed the Indian bureaucracy to control India. And there were small cultured, very wealthy British bureaucrats on top. They created this huge subcast of Indian bureaucracy, which is why business is so hard to do in India today. And after the British developed socialism to rule India, they used it on Britain, because in almost every case, techniques developed on the frontier will ripple backwards to the core of the empire. Alternately, a lot of Indian concepts about the universe being laya or Maya or an illusion spun by the gods, that had enormous influence on European nihilist philosophy, like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or Einstein, where these European thinkers at the start of the 20th century who were saying, man, just believe in nihilism and chill vibes, they were basing it off Indian thinking. And you look at the rise of this large interpersonal empire where the government takes up greater power and then the subject population shrink beneath the government. While the old. The older ideal of English governance was that there was the English community and the English people, which had natural aristocracies rising up. And England was a society, not a government. The idea that England is a government that controls the society, not that England is a society, was an idea they got from the Orient, which I think they originally developed from ruling India, which has all these ethnicities, all these cultures.

[Austin Padgett]

Is that. Is that where, like, social contracts kind.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Of language, social contract came from China. So that was a concept that the French Enlightenment got from Confucianism because France.

[Austin Padgett]

Bastards.

[Rudyard Lynch]

France in the 1700s was obsessed with China because China was the, was. It was a successful, supposedly secular, bureaucratic society.

[Austin Padgett]

That all makes so much sense. You know, the two levels, the, the techniques for managing populations, but also the philosophy, because Oriental philosophy, you know, Asia had advanced, developed philosophies that would, you know, that would be able to bleed in better than what was going on in Africa or North America or South America. And it's almost kind of like a Bronze Age dynamic with this Indian culture, like you said, where they're used to being ruled by Vichy leaders and warlord, foreign warlords. It's like a. So it's not. It probably was not that far out of their scope in terms of what they were used to. It was probably one of the more interesting foreign leaders to take over their government.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Indian political philosophy stems from Kautila, who was their Machiavelli and He lives around 300 B.C. and his political philosophy was purely realistic and purely power oriented. So English Indian political philosophy is basically take as much as you can because morality doesn't really exist. What this ironically did was incredibly weaken the power of the state in India because the state wasn't seen as being morally accountable. Which is why India was a theocracy where the religion was the dominant political. The religion was the dominant social institution where politics just came and went. And I can't overstate the importance of India to the empire. And it was widely said that the day we lose India is the day that the empire falls, which was basically true where the British gave India independence in 1947. And then from that it was just straight down because as I said before, India was 80% of the British Empire's population and it was called the crown jewel of the empire. And just for some cultural vibe material, my namesake, Rudyard Kipling. I'm named Rudyard Lynch. He was an Anglo from, interestingly, his family was from the part. Rudyard's a traditionally Quaker name from a certain part of England my ancestors are from. He got the name from that part of England. He grew up in India. And I've read several of his books which are quite good. Kim as an example where Kim is an Irish boy born and grows up in India as an Indian and then he realizes he's white. And so it's a story about how he has to come in terms of his dual Western Eastern heritage. So it's a relatively smart book because it's talking about, about the differences and complementary nature of Eastern and Western culture. And we construe Rudyard Kipling to be a horrifically racist author due to taking some of his works out of context. But if you actually study him as a person, he was one of the more sympathetic people of his era to Oriental culture. And then there's also the man who Would Be King, which is a fascinating story of these. It's a fictional story, these British adventurers who go to Afghanistan and carve out a kingdom. But that did happen where, interestingly, there was a guy from Chester County, Pennsylvania, which is the county I'm from. He carved out a feudal thief in Afghanistan. And there was a British guy who made himself the Sultan of brunei in the 1830s. And he ruled Brunei as a white sultan until the Japanese conquered the region. But I want to point this out because I am covering up so many other details. I mean, the British attacking Afghanistan twice due to the fear of the Russians, the British conquering Burma. India was the center of activity that stretched out to China and Japan, to South Africa, to Egypt, to Australia, where if you put the second British Empire and centered it on India, that would be more accurate than centering it on Britain.

[Austin Padgett]

Wow, that's amazing. And because I was thinking about why didn't they conquer China? Because they conquered Indonesia or parts of Egypt or these other places. And it sounds like it's because everything was geared towards supporting their operations in India.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The reason they didn't conquer China was that the reason they conquered India initially was that India saw a social and political breakdown that demanded they seize political control in order to maintain their economic operations. And the East India Company was predominantly a economic organization about shareholder, shareholders. And one of the things we forget is the actual amount of repression required in colonialism by the Europeans was quite low. Almost all India, almost everyone who supported the British Raj, were Indians, while almost no Britons could maintain control of India because the Indians hadn't really developed a strong national consciousness. And they'd been so beaten down by centuries of Muslim colonialism so that the British could conquer and control India with almost with very little effort. And then the thing with China was the Europeans split China up at its weakest point by economic zone. And China was able to maintain its political unity and its political functioning up to a certain point where the Europeans were better served working with the Chinese state to trade with China rather than just taking it over like India.

[Austin Padgett]

Okay. And I have an interest. I wonder if, are those British economic zones connected anyway to the modern Chinese special economic zones? Is that kind of where they got the idea? Interesting.

[Rudyard Lynch]

This is a good transition to The Far east, where so the British have been trading with China. This gels with the modern China video as well. The British, their first major story I've heard of them in China is they sent an expedition over in the 1790s offering China to trade. And they brought rifles and advanced Clockwork and technology 500 years more advanced than China. And the Chinese said, you are barbarians with nothing of use. And the British left. And then what happened is that China started falling into decadence and weakness and overpopulation. So in the 1840s, this is probably, this is one of those things that is based in a Nietzsche incense that we did, but is itself morally reprehensible. That being the Opium wars, where the British traded with China because China produced lots of luxuries and the British had nothing that the Chinese wanted to offer economically because China was self sufficient. So the British started selling opium to China in the early 19th century. And then what happened was that because China was overpopulated and the average Chinese guy lived in degrading poverty is that 10% of China's population became opium addicts just to get through the day. And the Chinese blames the British for this rather than looking at the reasons inside China why this happened. And the British said, psych. We believe in capitalism. If your people want opium, we'll give them opium. And this started a series of wars with China. And these are so humiliating for the Chinese, where a handful of British ships on the other side of the world took out every single major Chinese port very quickly. And they even sacked the Imperial palace in Beijing, which is inland. So the British had such a powerful technological advantage, due to technological, social whatever advantage, that they could take down India, China, entire continents, while exerting almost no effort. Because keep in mind for all these colonial wars, the British, I think they, they didn't have an income tax or they barely had an income tax. They weren't in total war economy. They didn't even think about it. So the British were such chads that they could do this stuff on the other side of the world without breaking a sweat. But in exchange, what happened is that the Chinese became intensely resentful. Not for. For a good reason, I think. And so modern China still feels deeply resentful of the Opium wars and they classify the Americans as another kind of British. And we are exporting our opium, which is our degeneracy, whether literal drugs, movies, porn, culture, freedom, whatever. And so they, they view their relationship with America as the equivalent to the new Opium Wars. But the British, they built these forts in the coast of China, which later became China's most important cities, where Hong Kong and Shanghai did not exist before the British or the British established them. And these had enormous downstream effects on China where Western culture was percolated into China from these British special economic zones. And in recent history when the Chinese Communist Party wanted to modernize the country after they gave up legitimate communism, they were building their economic model off how they had earlier gotten these skills from Europeans. So they established these coastal special economic zones as a. For sort, for sort of new version of the European coastal fort cities like Hong Kong, Shandong, Shanghai, etc. Port.

[Austin Padgett]

They managed, they managed them and saw the advantage of keeping them separate from the rest of their political governors control or political structures. And the whole Shanghai waterfront is European architecture. I've been on the other. On the. Yeah, it's really beautiful. And on the other side is skyscrapers.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

So if you go back in the city, it's all Chinese stuff but the waterfront and across where the, the financial zone is, it's all. It look, it could be like London or something. Yeah, well, yeah. And you. Yeah, go finish that because it's connected.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Oh, I was going to say I went to the HSBC building in Shanghai and it's one of those beautiful buildings I've seen in China which is kind of depressing that this like. Because HSBC is one of the biggest banks in the world. For some reason they bought up every single airport's advertising or what it feels like. So wherever you go, HSBC is just saying we're the best. And ironically they're not that intelligent or innovative as a bank. They're kind of sclerotic as a bank strategy now. But their building in Shanghai is gorgeous and there was this genuine European community in China that had surprisingly important cultural downstream effects.

[Austin Padgett]

And. And go. What are some of those effects? Because I, I kind of think of there being a gap between colonial China and modern China and I don't know about a lot of the strings.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So there was this huge cultural revolution. Not. Huh. I'm not going to use that word. There was a huge cultural transition in the late in the 19th and 20th centuries in China where one of the bloodiest wars in history was when this guy from South China, Hong Shu Kuan, spoke to a preacher from Kentucky who taught him Baptist Christianity. Then he started having these visions where he proclaimed himself the Son of Heaven and he launched a revolution that killed 20 million people. Another example is American missionaries were instrumental in ending foot binding in China, installing China, the Nationalist Chinese Party, which took over Taiwan, ultimately, was the creation of local Chinese in the south of the country, interacting with British and American people there. And a vastly disproportionate of culturally important people in the west stem from the Western expat communities in China in the early 20th century. I just keep on finding. I'll look someone up blank, was of American ancestry, was an American person who was born in Shanghai. A lot of the most important religious scholars, whether Houston Smith or Tealhard de Charda and a few others I'm forgetting were part of that community.

[Austin Padgett]

Well, right. That reminds me, of course, Hong Kong is a pretty clear connection because it's literally Western. Yeah, I lived there too, before I got taken over. And so Western scholars. And this is mostly religious scholars or general famous people.

[Rudyard Lynch]

This is just one of my observations. Whenever I see a famous person, I look up where they're from and what their ethnicity is. I memorize the hometown and ethnicity of celebrities. This is one of my hobbies. And I just keep running into this. I see it most with religious scholars, but it's. I think it's true of lots of celebrities too. Ironically, there's lots of celebrities in America whose families fought in Italy as part of the American military. Lots of celebrities are born in Italy. I forget the exact ones and I've seen it like six times.

[Austin Padgett]

Spaghetti Westerns. Maybe there's a connection there.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I think it's. It's just. There's weird correlations that happen for difficult to understand reasons. In anthropology, all of the knowledge hubs, cultural hubs. Sometimes it's random, sometimes it's due to some other factor you don't notice. Where Germans are the top piano manufacturers over most.

[Austin Padgett]

I know why that is. Well, there's the whole Steinway story, which is the reason Steinway came to America to create pianos is in Germany, they had the really restrictive guilt. So he was building pianos in his house and he couldn't sell them, he couldn't monetize it, and they wanted him to do it in a particular way. And obviously his was way better. So he went and blew up.

[Rudyard Lynch]

You.

[Austin Padgett]

Know, famous to this day for the best pianos.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, that's true of a single person. And then. But then if you keep seeing German advancement in piano manufacturing, it's probably due to an underlying cultural reason.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, their manufacturing talent.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

They were just restricted. So when they went to a free environment, they were the best.

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[Rudyard Lynch]

So we should probably cover Southeast Asia. The British had several colonies in Southeast Asia. They briefly held Indonesia and the Napoleonic wars which was a huge the Napoleonic wars were a huge point for the British Empire. But then the British seized control of Malaysia and yeah took Malaysia and Burma and they populated Malaysia with a lot of Chinese building Singapore and a huge transition in the Indian colony was in the 1850s. There was this huge revolt by the Indians against the British and the British were able to put it down. But in the process they removed the East India Company from power and they made India a crown colony under Empress Victoria. For Australia. Now Australia and New Zealand were populated in the early 1800s by different subgroups of Britain. So when you look at the genetics of white Australians, they're nearly as Irish as they are English. Australians are, have very little Scottish ancestry. They're mostly Irish and English with English being a slight plurality because Australia, the Dutch knew about it for centuries beforehand, but the English under James Cook, who is one of the greatest explorers ever and he's the most important explorer who lives outside the age of discovery where he sailed across the entire Pacific from Antarctica to Kamchatka in Russia, the west coast of Canada, he discovered Hawaii for Europeans and he discovered New Zealand. As well as being the first white man to sail around the entirety of. He was the first man to sail around the entirety of Australia. So Britain faced this horrifying crime issue due to their overpopulation and poverty in the early 1800s. And they thought because we have too many prisons, let's send these people who commit crimes to Australia, which is a huge island where no matter what they can't escape. And Australia saw this class bifurcation between the free settlers and the slave settlers and they made an active decision to not evolve into a caste system between the free settlers and the slave settlers, where the penal settlers, where Australia made this active decision that you could reintegrate into the society if you were a part of the penal colony. And Australians would brag about being 98% British until like 50 years ago. Because Australia was seen as this cultural manifestation of Britain in a, that happened to be in a tropical climate. And Australian culture was seen as conservative and masculine and vigorous and frontiers like Canada. And it's interesting that them and Canada went from very frontier masculine societies to hyper woke and multicultural so quickly.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, I always wondered that, especially with. And it hit a lot of people during COVID when they saw Australians locked down in massive quarantine camps like Chinese style.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And.

[Austin Padgett]

And you're like, wait, didn't they start off as a prison colony? Shouldn't they be a little bit more rebellious? But then I realized, well, maybe that's not the lesson they learned from prison. Maybe it's like when your parent beats you, you beat someone else. And their lesson from prison was the.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Anzacs, which is what I call. It's the World War I term for the antipodes. I also love the word antipodes. It's the other side of the world. And the antipodes have this enormous insecurity about trying to emulate the rest of the western world because they're stuck so far away. They try to ape whatever is culturally cool. And the other thing is both them and New Zealand were formed in an era of British history obsessed with social justice because the early 19th century was so brutal in Britain. And to their credit, the British elite made the active decision to push against it to try to help the poor. But in the David Hackett Fisher book Fairness and Freedom, he talks about how in New Zealand this idea of social justice that was popular at the time has stayed for their entire, their entire history. And he goes through how the New Zealanders have tried to reach fairness and social justice and it's devolved in the tall Poppy syndrome and envy in a lot of cases made them very susceptible to wokeness. Where New Zealand's interesting. Where Australia had a hunter gatherer population that was almost entirely wiped out overnight. New Zealand had a farming population called the Maori who populated it in the 1300s. And, and interestingly, there was no almost. There was very little violence in the colonization of either Australia or Canada or New Zealand, where they were all so lightly populated that there wasn't really a need for competition. Where the Maori were wiped out by European diseases and they signed a treaty where they kept a quarter of New Zealand and the white state and the rest. But New Zealand was selected from mostly people from the south of England, which is part. The part that populated the American south as well as northern Scotland in the bottom of New Zealand. And the only settlers for New Zealand were people. Their settlement selection process was you had to be a longstanding member of an Anglican church in rural South England and only then would they let you sign up for the companies to immigrate there. So their selection pressure was done by South English Anglican pastors recommending their best clients.

[Austin Padgett]

So is that the same group as the Northeast U.S. or a little bit different?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Different, yeah. Different selection pressures. Where the Puritans were East English and they were kind of, they were East English capitalists. And so over the course from the 1600s to the 1800s, religion went from this dynamic insane force to being more chill social control. The selection pressures for a religious person in the 17th century are not the same as today. And so a joke my dad has is that New Zealand is an island off the west coast of Canada because they're so culturally close.

[Austin Padgett]

That's funny.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. It would be fun to do more of a Seeds, Seeds of Albion kind of analysis on Australia and New Zealand as well.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's, that's a. I've considered making an entire video on the greater British diaspora, not just comparing America versus Australia versus New Zealand versus Canada versus South Africa. But also I find the modern British almost completely. I feel very little cultural connection to them, although we're genetically identical. And it's interesting to see how Britain as a society itself has changed where the diasporas keep these older British traits. Well, if you look at, I find lower class British culture today to be in their elite culture too, for different reasons. I find lower class British culture to be really sad because it's so envious and short sighted and it dislikes any effort or culture. And then their upper class culture has been completely consumed by suicidal wefism and elitism. They're trying to destroy their own populations. Britain has not. The last century has not been kind to Britain.

[Austin Padgett]

Neither cultures are aspirational. Yeah, yeah. A little bit worried about Britain in the next five, 10 years, but hopefully they're, hey, maybe their colonies can show them the way.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I'm not a little bit worried. I'm a lot worried.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I'm gonna throw this fun fact in before I forget it, before we get to Africa, the final main area the British conquered. But so after the end of the slave trade, which the British did push through, the British ended slavery first in 1833 and then they ended around the world where they ended slavery in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, because they could no longer import black slaves. There was this period when the British were importing Bengalis to Guyana in South America because they had to grow or they were growing sugar in Guyana and Indians were a cheap labor force. And so they would sail these Indians often in terrible conditions from Bengal to South America, have them work the sugar plantations. And now Guyana next to Brazil is plurality Hindu, which is just fascinating. And interestingly, they are the only poor Indian diaspora because the reason Indian Americans are so rich is that we're pulling predominantly from Tamil Brahmins, who are the highest caste of the wealthiest province of India. But for, but for Guyana, they were pulling from low caste farmer Bengalis. And. And so that population is actually poorer than the local black population. So not all Indian diasporas are the same.

[Austin Padgett]

Wow, that's interesting. And yeah, we didn't really mention the class system when it comes to India, but that probably contributed to the ease of the colonization because the. No one's going to be in charge except for the Brahmin.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

So they're the only ones you really need to deal with. It's like they have automatic, like you can take over the nobility, but then you don't know if that nobility is going to be able to control the rest of the population in India. That part of the equation was never really a problem.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Britain's control of India periodically combined basically immense utilitarian brutality with very kind governance. Where the, for example, the British control of Bengal caused a massive economic crash for a variety of reasons and a loss of Bengal's urban economy. And the British famines in India, were they one of the bloodiest events in history? For the same reason the British famines in Ireland were so brutal. But then on top of it, the British cleared out an area the size of a European country in Pakistan for agriculture. The British built India's rail system. So India in the 19th century had more railroad track than any European country. The British educated the Indians against their own self interest. Where there's a story from John Gunter, who was a journalist from the World War II era, where he traveled around the British Empire and he asked British officials in Africa, why do you educate the local Africans if the second you do, they become nationalists? And the British said, because it's the right thing to do. And there's two books that I think are symbolic of the two differences of the British Empire. You have Niall Ferguson's book Empire, then you have Sashi Taror's book Inglorious Empire. And I think Sashi Taroor makes an interesting case for the British Empire being evil. And I read it when I was hiking the Appalachian Trail five years ago. And over time I've grown to respect it less. Because first of all, Sashi Taror murdered his wife. You're like, it's not technically proven, but we definitely think so. And I have people who know him who say that he's not honest. And as more time passes, he's seen as a very corrupt figure. But there is an argument the British Empire in India was brutal, but you look at the former British colonies and they're vastly better than the other colonies. British colonies, irrespective of geography or ability or whatever, are wealthier than non British colonies. And that's because the British prioritized rule of law, democracy, and the economy. And you can talk about the British being brutal, but every colonial empire ever is brutal. The French were brutal, the Russians were brutal, The Germans were brutal. And so the British Empire reached higher highs while having equivalent brutalities to other European colonial empires.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, and it's like, my friend that I mentioned who. Who's like, yeah, sure, you can. You can engage in resentful politics and you can accurately point out oppression or. But you can also be like, yeah, yeah, but look at, look at these ideas. Read this. Like, this is. This is Cool. I would. I don't care what your conclusion from that. And in terms of the sensitivity with colonialism, can you break down the relationship a little bit more between the East India Company and the government? Like they both had their own foreign policy, but when did they combine? How much were they coordinated? Was there any opposition? Or was it. Was it more like an instructional relationship?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, the British Empire was pretty hands off in every way because they were all about keeping the cost of governance as low as possible. So the British Empire's interaction with the East India Company was really, we don't care what you do as long as. As long as you don't cost the British taxpayer too much. So part of the east, part of the Opium War, was the British government saying, hey guys, if you have to fight China to level your costs, we'd prefer that than paying tax money to you. And an example of the sort of relationship they had. And keep in mind that these sort of colonial companies were the norm in that time period. Almost all of European colonialism was done by VC Capital, who just did it, not the centralized governments. And the Clive, who was the guy who conquered India, who was ostensibly a military genius, as well as the Duke of Wellington who fought in the Napoleonic wars, he also started out his career in India fighting against the notorious Tipu Sultan. Clive, after conquering Bengal and a lot of that area, he took lots of local bribes and became stunningly wealthy. And as a sign the British weren't completely brutal, there was a whole series of trials where the British Parliament were like, Clive, you took too much money and you hurt too many locals. So we're going to have a legal investigation to see that you're not completely evil. And he did, I think he did eventually get passed through, but he was put to the wringer of 18th century British politics. And what he said is that I am still better than what the local standards are. He said I was unimaginably corrupt and brutal, but I'm still better than what the. I'm still better than what the. What was going on beforehand. And he said, if you are put in my shoes, you do the exact same thing because you don't understand the actual reality of the situation out there.

[Austin Padgett]

Clyde actually became, well, it just shows the morals, the level of moral standards they were held to and held themselves to, because while the people out in the forefront maybe had a more nuanced attitude, like the. The backdrop of following certain values and practices was incredibly strong and a very, very hard thing to get around. So it was. There was a high Quality of character that is, you know, unusual. Historically.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Part of the cause of the American Revolution was that the natives, the British actually honored the treaty they made at the natives, that the Americans would not go west to the Appalachians, where the British had stronger relationships with the native confessor. Confederacy. Confederacy is in a lot of cases than they did at the British colonies. But this was ultimately completely unsustainable because British America was growing so rapidly and so outnumbered and outdeveloped the native populations.

[Austin Padgett]

And so you could see why the natives sided with them, essentially.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, exactly.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's why the natives mostly fought with the British in the American Revolution. So the last major colonial region we haven't covered, or there's two. The first is that the British went to enormous effort to create a unified navigational system because British power was naval. Where the British greatest strength was that the British navy was the best navy in the world. The British could attack anywhere with the coastline, which is how they built up their empire, by gradually building up coastal forts and then from the coastal forts, expanding to conquer the hinterland. And so the British, they seized control of the Mediterranean in the 18th century, where they had Gibraltar in the south of Spain, they had Majorca, they had Malta off the coast of Italy, Crete off the coast of Greece, and Cyprus off the coast of Turkey. So the British had complete control of the Mediterranean and they would try to seize these islands which they could use as naval bases, whether legal, and off the coast of Germany, whether Singapore. And you could view a lot of the British Empire as an attempt to get these. These trading forts that they could resupply their coal for their navy with. And now the final part of the British Empire that we haven't covered is Africa. And I'm going to keep Africa brief because we already have an entire video on Africa. But the British did really well out of the Napoleonic wars, where those were wars where Britain was able to scoop up all of the colonies that France conquered their motherlands of. So the Napoleonic wars, because Napoleon was conquering across Europe, Latin America got independence. And Latin America was actually economically completely dependent on Britain. In the 19th century, Peruvians who wanted to go from Lima to their own jungle hinterland in the Amazon, would sail Lima to London, then London, up to Brazil, up the Amazon. So. And then on top of that, the British seized South Africa from the Dutch, and South Africa became a bridgehead of British colonization, where it was their center of operations. And I'm not going to get so much into this, but the British fought with the local Dutch population and Cecil Rhodes was instrumental in the conquest of South Central Africa. And the British had forts mostly for slave trading along the west coast of Africa, which expand into their possessions being Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone. And the British and the French had a few tassels over Africa, either north Nigeria or between Sudan and Congo. And the Scramble for Africa period in which Europeans divided up almost the entire continent of Africa in the 19th century. In the end of the 19th century, the British took the best portions with their dream being taking Cape to Cairo, which they nearly did, except for the German control of Tanzania. And so the British had South Central Africa and they took over Egypt and kept it under its local Mameluke governance as a puppet state due to taking the Suez Canal. And they fought with the in the Sudan against a Islamic religious fundamentalist called the Mahdi, who launched a revolt that killed a million people. And the last cavalry charge in British history in which Winston Churchill participated was against the Mahdi in 1898.

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting. Yeah. And we just covered a lot of the Africa stuff in that recent video. And I guess one perspective I'm curious about your thoughts about was you could say like the British Empire was a water empire.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

I'm trying to think about the biggest empires in history and if you can qualify them as a water empire or a land empire.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And is it. Could you say that pretty much every major European empire has been a water power? Because if you look at Rome, their entire network and all their strategic, most important connections were ocean routes in the Mediterranean. And then they bubbled out, you know, within a radius of their water connections. England was all water connections. I guess if you could count the. The Frank Empire. You could also connect that maybe a little bit to the water through the.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Normans, the Russians and the Romans and the Germans aren't water empires. All the others are water empires. The Romans were paradoxically not a water empire where they weren't a seafaring people. They just happened to hug the Mediterranean. So the Romans very rarely got into wars for oceanic reasons. They got into wars over land. And the Germans and the Russians are more obvious, but the British were a water empire. The sec. The first and the third French empires were water empires. The Spanish were a water empire. The British were probably the best water empire in history. They just maxed water empire to the peak and to cover the last colony. And then we'll wrap up. The British Empire is Kenya, where Kenya was lightly populated and it was seen as an extension of British India. And so the British used Indian labor to build a railroad from the coast to the interior. And the Indian laborers were killed by local oversized lions. The British had to kill. And the British established control over the local populations where and this is a norm for the British Empire. The British almost always ruled their local nobilities not through, not through direct British officials. And in Kenya you saw the dispossession of local populations for white British settlement where they made plantations in Kenya, where inside the mountains of central Kenya, which have a temperate Mediterranean climate, you can see British style manor houses next to giraffes. And this was a pretty small population, but it was instrument, it was important for Britain because it was mostly upper class people who moved there, who had connections back in Britain. And what happened over time is that in the 50s, Kenya had a local revolt by the Mao people, the majority Kikuyu population. And the British did put it down brutally. And then what happened is the British lost the will to rule. So they gave Kenya independence. And it. The British Empire is profoundly anticlimactic. Where the reason they lost was due to the World wars. Britain in 1914 was the center of the world technologically, culturally, economically. And then slam, slam again. And by the time we get to the 50s, due to complex factors which we'll discuss in the World wars video, Britain was just screwed. Where they were completely dependent on American food, they were dependent on American loans. And Britain also became a socialist nation where the thing, the reason the British lost the empire was switching from an aristocratic, noble, capitalist society to a managerial socialist society. Which firstly resulted in the British losing the Empire and then resulted in them losing their. Losing their. Their prosperity and freedom at home. Where Britain became a society that went from almost no taxes to a 95% tax rate for income, Britain went from a. Went to. Became the most socialist country in Western Europe. And as they lost the will to empire and as they lost the will to even struggle inside their own country, they gave the empire freedom by their own choice without most of the empire having to fight. And we forget how astonishing that is where almost no empires give up their empires for free because they see it as morally the right thing to do. And I think it's crazy that we go back to the European colonial empires which gave up their empires out of goodwill. And we see that they weren't generous enough because what they did was so insanely generous by historic stuff standards.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. I think we made this point earlier, but it's like if someone's viewed as controlling you or subverting you or controlling your honor, then it doesn't matter how nicely they treat you like People are going to reject it. And it's interesting to think of the comparison with the Chinese who refused to do colonialism because they were afraid to be corrupted.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Only for England to adopt the. The bureaucratic collectivism of their Oriental colonies.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Not that that's really totally the reason. I think you have plenty of opportunity for these trends to break down within our own countries the same way. But it's just funny to think about, like, give the Chinese a little bit of a point.

[Rudyard Lynch]

There are three points that are symbolic for the death of the British Empire. The first was the Atlantic Accords Churchill signed with fdr. And this was the. This basically turned America into Britain to an American client state where the British were completely dependent upon America to survive World War II. But in the process, there is this implicit understanding that American support came with the loss of the empire, which leads to the suez crisis in 1951, where the former puppet state and the former puppet state in Egypt seized the Suez Canal and the British and the French took. Retook it over in order to stabilize control of their sea route that demanded this access. And then what happened is that the Americans said, sorry, guys, we're not going to support you. And the British and the French backed down. And then the third point is with Gandhi, who launched this Indian liberationist movement through. Through peaceful resistance. And then the British caved to it. And people like to use Gandhi as this example of pacifist cultural technology working. But the reality is every other empire, even the British earlier, would have just shot Gandhi. Gandhi's success, says, has more to do with the goodwill of the British Empire than any actual resistance by the Indians. Because any of these given colonies, if they actually tried to fight independence, as we saw in Malaya, the British would have beaten them due to military superiority.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And of course, in our narrative, it's like, oh, the enlightened. It's like Pocahontas. Oh, like the enlightened person being colonized has taught us our humanity.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly.

[Austin Padgett]

Meanwhile, they don't even care if their children die in India unless they're Christian or something.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, by the way, that's a reference to a book about the origins of Christianity, which was written by an Indian guy and he was talking about mercenary work in different villages.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Oh. The British also had Iraq and Syria and Iraq and Palestine as colonies. They established the Mandate of Israel. They took those from the Turks. Briefly. I just wanted to throw in the final British colonies. I forgot, so.

[Austin Padgett]

And I meant missionary, not mercenary. Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So that's all I have to say. Anything else.

[Austin Padgett]

Austin this is our the British. It's, you know, the sun touches every part of it, so it's going to take a long time to get around, I think.

[Rudyard Lynch]

British Empire followed by ancient Israel are two reasonably long videos because the effects are so enormous. So catch you next week for Frontier America.

[Austin Padgett]

Exciting. Yeehaw.

[Rudyard Lynch]

You should believe in yourself and not die. And you should make money.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, believe in yourself.

[Whatifalth]

History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube, forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.